School takes up 7 ½ hours of our day, but we take little notice to appreciate those specific teachers who make these hours so special to us. These are the teachers who make us smile when we break down in a flood of tears. They are the teachers who encourage their students to push on further even when they are on a road with no ends. They urge us to go further, beyond anything we have done before. These teachers are the lights of our day, brushing the rain clouds away, and sending failure the opposite way. Some of our favorite teachers are so important to us that we would forget about everything, just listening to them. In our lives, we all have teachers like that we often have called our favorites. But, the thing we overlook the most is the fact that we NEED to appreciate these teachers.

To me, Mr. Deffner is that kind of teacher. Mr. Deffner is one of those seldom people: honest, friendly, and a true companion. He opened the world to a whole new page before me — he made me understand it from the other side of the road. Although he may forever only be just a Spanish teacher to many people, he is one of my favorite teachers. Mr. Deffner has always been a mentor. Over the course of my 2 years with him, I have learned 2 major lessons: his devotion and his care for his students.

One of my encounters with Mr. Deffner brought this dominant trait of his true reality for me. It was during my 6th grad year, and I was in Spanish class as usual, kicking back, relaxing, not a case for anything in the world. I looked up sluggishly at the blue-green dust infested chalkboard, and sighed, why do through this every day? I open up my note book anyway, and flopped open the font cover, tuned the torn, yellow-brown pages, and found a clean page, picked up my pencil watched it as if took the long reach across the blue lines, dancing wildly between the spaces. Then I felt an urgent tap on my shoulder, and turned around. To my surprise, it was the girl with the wavy brown hair and cold blue eyes of an angel that I rarely talked to. I couldn’t really interpret anything she was saying though, since I was trying to zone the teacher out at the same time. It wasn’t quite working, either. A distant call for me made me turn around, back into the real world. He looked at me with such a stern look, I thought some one had died, but what he said next nearly sent me flying through the wall behind me. His voice broke the earth shattering silence in the room. “I am talking to your father this afternoon, I would advice you to get some work done.” It struck me as a blue moon against the blackest night. His honesty was something that no one could drive around town with. Over the years of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, I come to realize his profound traits. No one could walk around with a personality like Mr. Deffner.

In a world like today, with as much of this and so little of withheld in that, the key of surviving in today’s society competitively is the secrets of one bare adjective: care. Care is another one of Mr. Deffner’s dominant traits. Many students feel as if it is a teacher’s job to care for their students. It clearly is not, when certain teachers choose to stay after school to help their students and others do not. Mr. Deffner is a teacher who didn’t stay after school each day, but he was the teacher who would lend his hand for whatever student was out there. During the course of my 2 years with Mr. Deffner, I had encountered numerous extra help times with him. He treated me each time with the same amount care. He slowly and patiently led me through each part of the lesson. The extra-help sessions that he generously provided were very helpful for someone who was absent from class. Unlike our classes though, these sessions were more constricted, and more condensed on just learning and getting more familiar with using words or basic grammar. During these sessions, we get more practice than we would in a classroom setting. To me, this allowed me to have a better understanding on something that would seem confusing if taught on a larger scale.

Mr. Deffner is someone who is a mentor, a role model, and a person who we all should admire. We should all know to see past his outer person, to the great teacher and role model he always was.